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a day of submissions
Feb. 24th, 2021 08:31 pmA week or so ago my thesis supervisor called my attention to a conference session that sounds perfect for my research: Lithic Raw Materials in Prehistory: Methods, Practice and Theory at the upcoming 27th Annual Meeting of
the European Association of Archaeologists: Widening Horizons and suggested that I submit a poster presentation.
So I wrote up a quick abstract draft:
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Can Steatite Accessory Minerals be used as a key to “fingerprinting” steatite quarries?
Steatite, an easily carved talc-rich metamorphic rock, has been used to make household objects for as long as people have been working with stone. Due to its high heat capacity, it was especially popular in Viking Age Scandinavia for making cooking pots and has been found even in settlement locations (such as Iceland) with no local sources of steatite. Archaeologists wishing to better understand which quarries were supplying which settlements have made many attempts over the years to use whole-rock trace-element geochemistry to determine the provenance of steatite household objects. However, many of these papers discuss the challenges inherent in trying to use whole-rock composition for a rock type which is known for being inhomogeneous at the outcrop scale. Therefore, this pilot study focuses on the accessory minerals present in the soapstone, particularity the opaque sulphide and oxide minerals, which are the phases most likely to contain many of those trace elements.
Laser-ablation ICP-MS trace-element composition maps of accessory minerals (and their surrounding matrix minerals) have been made from samples collected from a variety of Swedish and Norwegian steatite outcrops to determine the ways in which these minerals are or are not zoned with respect to their major and trace elements, and to investigate the differences in these patterns from one location to another in hopes of developing a more reliable way to quickly match steatite to its source quarry.
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And sent it off to my supervisor for comment. Today I got this reply:
"This abstract is absolutely excellent, Riia. It is so close to being a paper that could be presented orally! What do you think, Kamal? It would be ideal if you had just a couple of archaeological examples to use as test cases for this to be an oral presentation. As a poster, this is perfect. I have no corrections to offer. It is clear and interesting and well written as is."
So I just turned it in, with a big smile on my face.
This morning I saw an email from ResearchGate suggesting that they had found jobs I might be interested in (they are usually totally wrong about that), but I was having problems focusing on work, so I clicked on it to see what they had, and saw a Senior Scientist for Metamorphic Geology position with the Finnish Geological Survey (GTK), specifying that the location would be either Espoo, Kuopio, or Rovaniemi. Of these three, Espoo is not at all interesting--it is in the greater Helsinki area, which is way too far south and way too densely populated for my taste. Kuopio is in the middle of Finland (slightly further south than Umeå, Sweden (which is about three hours south of me), but inland, and so perhaps it gets better winters? Rovaniemi, on the other hand, is just north of the Arctic Circle, so, from my perspective, the most interesting of the set (but I don't know if either Rovaniem or Kuopio have SCA people).
Metamorphic geology is what I did my PhD on, and if LTU had a metamorphic geology research group instead of an ore geology research group, I would have stayed in research instead of switching to being a lab tech years ago. However, my recent application to the Norwegian geological survey didn't even get me an interview (my contact there tells me they had way more applications than expected), so I called the person listed in the ad and asked about it. I told him that I wanted to be certain that they wouldn't move my application into the reject pile straight away since I have been in the lab for some years and thus my field experience isn't recent. After asking me some questions about my experience he encouraged my application, saying they hadn't had many applicants yet.
Therefore I spent this evening revising my CV. I had pared it down quite a bit to make it all fit on just a few pages, and I wonder if that was a contribution to not getting an interview in Norway, so I put back in more details about my research, focusing on things that are relevant to metamorphic geology, which bumped it from 3 to 4 pages. Once that was done I had a look at their application page, and saw that this was one of those which require one to fill in text boxes for every single job or bit of education one has, showing start and end dates etc. At this point (17:40, Sweden time) I emailed the person I spoke to this morning with thanks for the call, and asked if GTK is one of those companies that puts most weight on the information in that form, or if it is an option to write "see CV" and skip that part? Half an hour later (or 19:13 Finnish time) I got a reply saying "I think that it is better to just upload the CV. If somebody questions it I will tell that it was my recommendation. Please upload also the list of your publications if it is not included in the CV. Lycka till!"
So I wrote up the cover letter, filled in some bare-bones info on their forms, along with "see CV", and submitted the application (including the requested publication list), then I sent another follow-up email with thanks and letting them know I had taken the advice.
It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. The deadline for this application is 3 March, so I might actually hear something fairly soonish?
the European Association of Archaeologists: Widening Horizons and suggested that I submit a poster presentation.
So I wrote up a quick abstract draft:
*****************************************
Can Steatite Accessory Minerals be used as a key to “fingerprinting” steatite quarries?
Steatite, an easily carved talc-rich metamorphic rock, has been used to make household objects for as long as people have been working with stone. Due to its high heat capacity, it was especially popular in Viking Age Scandinavia for making cooking pots and has been found even in settlement locations (such as Iceland) with no local sources of steatite. Archaeologists wishing to better understand which quarries were supplying which settlements have made many attempts over the years to use whole-rock trace-element geochemistry to determine the provenance of steatite household objects. However, many of these papers discuss the challenges inherent in trying to use whole-rock composition for a rock type which is known for being inhomogeneous at the outcrop scale. Therefore, this pilot study focuses on the accessory minerals present in the soapstone, particularity the opaque sulphide and oxide minerals, which are the phases most likely to contain many of those trace elements.
Laser-ablation ICP-MS trace-element composition maps of accessory minerals (and their surrounding matrix minerals) have been made from samples collected from a variety of Swedish and Norwegian steatite outcrops to determine the ways in which these minerals are or are not zoned with respect to their major and trace elements, and to investigate the differences in these patterns from one location to another in hopes of developing a more reliable way to quickly match steatite to its source quarry.
*****************************************
And sent it off to my supervisor for comment. Today I got this reply:
"This abstract is absolutely excellent, Riia. It is so close to being a paper that could be presented orally! What do you think, Kamal? It would be ideal if you had just a couple of archaeological examples to use as test cases for this to be an oral presentation. As a poster, this is perfect. I have no corrections to offer. It is clear and interesting and well written as is."
So I just turned it in, with a big smile on my face.
This morning I saw an email from ResearchGate suggesting that they had found jobs I might be interested in (they are usually totally wrong about that), but I was having problems focusing on work, so I clicked on it to see what they had, and saw a Senior Scientist for Metamorphic Geology position with the Finnish Geological Survey (GTK), specifying that the location would be either Espoo, Kuopio, or Rovaniemi. Of these three, Espoo is not at all interesting--it is in the greater Helsinki area, which is way too far south and way too densely populated for my taste. Kuopio is in the middle of Finland (slightly further south than Umeå, Sweden (which is about three hours south of me), but inland, and so perhaps it gets better winters? Rovaniemi, on the other hand, is just north of the Arctic Circle, so, from my perspective, the most interesting of the set (but I don't know if either Rovaniem or Kuopio have SCA people).
Metamorphic geology is what I did my PhD on, and if LTU had a metamorphic geology research group instead of an ore geology research group, I would have stayed in research instead of switching to being a lab tech years ago. However, my recent application to the Norwegian geological survey didn't even get me an interview (my contact there tells me they had way more applications than expected), so I called the person listed in the ad and asked about it. I told him that I wanted to be certain that they wouldn't move my application into the reject pile straight away since I have been in the lab for some years and thus my field experience isn't recent. After asking me some questions about my experience he encouraged my application, saying they hadn't had many applicants yet.
Therefore I spent this evening revising my CV. I had pared it down quite a bit to make it all fit on just a few pages, and I wonder if that was a contribution to not getting an interview in Norway, so I put back in more details about my research, focusing on things that are relevant to metamorphic geology, which bumped it from 3 to 4 pages. Once that was done I had a look at their application page, and saw that this was one of those which require one to fill in text boxes for every single job or bit of education one has, showing start and end dates etc. At this point (17:40, Sweden time) I emailed the person I spoke to this morning with thanks for the call, and asked if GTK is one of those companies that puts most weight on the information in that form, or if it is an option to write "see CV" and skip that part? Half an hour later (or 19:13 Finnish time) I got a reply saying "I think that it is better to just upload the CV. If somebody questions it I will tell that it was my recommendation. Please upload also the list of your publications if it is not included in the CV. Lycka till!"
So I wrote up the cover letter, filled in some bare-bones info on their forms, along with "see CV", and submitted the application (including the requested publication list), then I sent another follow-up email with thanks and letting them know I had taken the advice.
It will be interesting to see if anything comes of it. The deadline for this application is 3 March, so I might actually hear something fairly soonish?